Linda Stupart

WHO'S ABJECT NOW BITCH? 2009/10 installation: fake blood, red thread, mic. stands YOUNGBLACKMAN GALLERY, 69 Roeland St Cape Town. Photo: Kim Daniels.

Artist Makes Mark in Blood at City Gallery. Cape Times. 5 January 2010.

By Suzy Bell

In the East City village of Cape Town, in a small gallery, a white space the shape of a loaf of bread, Who’s Abject Now Bitch? or Crime Scene Consistent with a Particular Double Homicide is a striking, beautiful concept-driven exhibition by a provocative young installation artist. Linda Stupart is an interesting artist to watch, she’s a feminist, a self-confessed WWE fan, an astute and wonderfully controversial cultural commentator and critic who merrily tweets that she makes art in order to give other people her problems.

It is in this simple architectural space called YOUNGBLACKMAN that a white fluorescent light is reflected in a pool of fresh blood, okay, stage blood. Dried blood slowly drips artfully from the white walls, and on the floor are eerie dark puddles of realistic looking blood the colour of 1000 smashed plums. It resembles a slaughterhouse and one is not sure if two men have been slaughtered, or a family of pigs, as there is just so much bloody blood. Or, if indeed, a woman scorned did the slaughtering.

Using bright red wool, Linda has created a web of perfectly symmetrical threads of emotion that link to the puddles and bloodied walls, or threads to represent veins, arteries, or even intestines. They reflect on metaphysical levels, I’m sure much much more as the artist explains: “As well as using this traditionally women’s ‘craft’ medium (which links the exhibition to old-school feminists of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1960s and 70s), these strained lines reflect actual forensic detection methods, in which blood splatter experts use such thread in a trigonometry exercise to trace the angle and size of blood splatter in an effort to find the source of impact.” When asked where she became aware of this practice, the artist smirks: “I saw it on Dexter”, a notoriously bloody contemporary television series about a blood splatter expert serial killer. “But my research shows it’s actually also a genuine forensic tool,” says Linda who then adds that the threads trace to a point of violence, following the narrative, the position of the here absent artist’s body as she commits the crime/artfully flings blood on the walls.

It is refreshing to view an exhibition that deals with multiple layers of feminine reality and gives a well thought of nod to early feminists. This exhibition reflects the not-often addressed issues of the women’s voice, but here it is a wider canvas as it is coupled with art, violence and what the artist describes as “the abject subject within the particularities of the South African art world.”

And she should know: As an active creative force in Cape Town, Linda has mentored Michaelis art students, she was part originator of artheat.net and she kick-started the lively Mixtape blog. In the incestuous local art scene she is known to hold her own as part of the East City’s Bad Boy Bubby club – with one feisty girl

“I know that this exhibition is good for YOUNGBLACKMAN, in the same way as male dealers who sold Cindy Sherman’s to rich male buyers (for example) are maintaining the closed collusive power cycle, even as they sell a kind of feminism,” adds Linda. “My work generally, more than anything, is about this struggle – it’s powerful, while at the same time painfully unaffecting. I am victim and victor, player and tool of a patriarchal system. We all are. And is important in that it is also a reminder of the way that there is much that hasn't changed both in the artworld and broader society with regard to gender inequality.”

In her recent Mixtape blog Linda writes: “I feel the scars on my tongue from him trying to bite through it last night. I remember screaming his name as he hurt me.” Apt if it is all true, considering it is here she publically explores her favourite subjects, sex, violence and death, but way better if in future, it’s her mighty fine imagination.

Like performance artist, Marina Abramović , perhaps they share the same mantra: “Art hurts”, as blood and pain are equally Linda’s desired explored media. But, conceptually, Linda prefers to be linked to artists like Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle, who both use installation to tell of their personal lives as women – using, explains Linda, artmaking cathartically as a way to transform their victimhood.

But is it really all: “masochism, misogyny and melodrama. Just another Saturday night,” as Linda wryly tweets? And then there’s the snippety snip comment of her take on being invited to exhibit: “Oh wow, you’re letting me show in your gallery?” she pants. “The gallery I pretty much conceptualised while I was in bed with you?” That’s amazing! And you want me to do something slick, that doesn’t interrupt your white cube too much. Awesome! What a wonderful opportunity…”

And all this in a gallery named after two men, whom she chooses to lose blood over, but I think the result is a success and a high-five for Linda who has the spleen to engage on a serious level as a conceptual artist and equally play tango with taking the piss as Linda is most triumphantly all for “acknowledging and interrupting the artworld boys’ club that is in many ways embodied by the gallery, YOUNGBLACKMAN.” Indeed. Well worth a view, especially highly recommended for the squeamish.